WCPCA - Board Meeting - February 21, 2008

Board Meeting - February 21, 2008

West Cascade Peace Corps Association
Summary of the Board Meeting
on 2/21/08, 7:30 pm

Attending: James, Brett, Evangelina, Rolly, Felicia, Deb, Benj, Wayne, Dorothy

James chaired the meeting as the new president of WCPCA. He had prepared an agenda which we followed. James appointed Rolly as the new vice president and the board ratified his choice. These changes were necessary since Dustin had resigned as president effective 2/4/08. The leaves Rolly's previous office, board member at-large, vacant.

The board agreed to find an appropriate way to thank Dustin for his service as president over the last year and a half. We plan to do this at the next potluck if possible.

The minutes of the January had already been circulated by email and approved by the board.

Treasurer's Report: Evangelina reported that we have the following balances in our accounts at the Oregon Community Credit Union:

For the last month our deposits came from fundraising and membership dues and totaled $460. Disbursements of $743 were for expenses related to our application for "501 C3" status from the IRS, taxes, potluck expenses, and paying membership dues to the national organization on behalf of members who joined through WCPCA.

Evangelina distributed a proposal for the investment of the funds in Beryl's Memorial Fund that was prepared by Rick Karr of Edward Jones Investments and reviewed and recommended by Jim Beyer of WCPCA.Mr. Karr's services have been recommended by Jim and the former has offered to manage this fund at no cost to the organization.

Mr. Karr recommended conservative investments that are predicted to yield 4.25% annually or $932 for an investment of $22,000. The board accepted this proposal and asked Evangelina to make arrangements for a meeting with Mr. Karr to set up the account. She agreed to do so by mid-March.

The board discussed investing $2,500 of our funds from the business checking and business money market accounts in a 3 month CD since there was no immediate need to use them. A motion was made to this effect and then tabled so that Evangelina could investigate where the best interest rate could be found for this step.

Evangelina reported that last month she tried to submit to the Peace Corps the $300 that the board had authorized for the project in Mongolia in which Hannah Klausman participates. Evangelia learned on the PC website for such projects that this one had already been fully funded.

The board wants to make this donation directly to the project thinking that there will be ways for the funds to help and to support a local volunteer. Rolly agreed to contact Hannah's mother, Anita Tanner, who lives in Eugene, to let her know this and make arrangements to transfer the funds with her help.

Communication Coordinator's Report:

Website: Felicia reported that she is in the process of arranging for our website to be used to purchase merchandise with Paypal. James will be sending her photos and a list of merchandise to add. (You can already pay for memberships this way.) For the immediate future James will be the one to send merchandise to those who purchase it. As we acquire new merchandise we'll arrange for the sales to be handled by Cafepress.com. New merchandise will include peace cards that James makes. He'll split the profit with WCPCA.

Publicity: Felicia needs to have the information about the next potluck by March 5th in order to get it into all of the local papers.

Database: Earlier in the day Felicia had sent Excel spreadsheets generated from the database to all of the board members to show names, membership status, and contact information for various subgroups of RPCVs. This is the way the board will be able to use the database. WCPCA currently has 65 paid members.

Anyone who can't open an Excel spread sheet on his/her computer should talk to Felicia about how to work this out. Printed sheets of this information were available at the board meeting but this won't be the usual case. If a board member wants a paper copy of an Excel spread sheet he/she needs to ask Dorothy directly.

The database has all members recorded along with people whose membership has recently expired and many who belonged long ago or who have never belonged but wanted to be informed. Felicia will include information on how to update contact information, an announcement that people can now use Paypal for memberships, and information on how people may take their names off of the mailing list.

Board only: Felicia set up a "board only" potion of the website where much contact information about the board members and general membership can be found and also how to access the emailing list. In addition there is information about the way that the website is constructed. There is no link directly to this area. Board members must know the specific URL, login name, and password separately. They've received this information directly.

At Felicia and Evangelina's recommendation, the board voted to give Tricia Tate a lifetime membership in recognition of her donation to Beryl's memorial fund.

The board thanked Felicia for the significant effort to create the website and database, both to help us manage our organization.

Renewing membership: We talked about how we might contact members whose memberships have either recently expired or will expire soon. Felicia had given us a list of 15 such people that she generated from the database. James assigned a board member to each person to call and encourage the person to rejoin. Dorothy will write a short info-sheet for board members to use to do this. This will be available via email by 2/27.

In the future, as memberships approach their expiration date, we agreed to contact the member to encourage him/her to renew in the following way: phone call and then wait a week; email and then wait two weeks; finally a post card. Benj and Evangelina have designed a post card. James will review it to make suggestions that he thinks will help. Exactly who will be responsible for the above remains to be decided.

The board acknowledged that the constitution defines a member of WCPCA as one who pays his/her dues and agreed that all board members need to be members of the organization.

Report from the on campus PC recruiter: Brett gave us an update on his plans for the NOM party:
date April 22nd, 6-8 pm
place Many Nations Longhouse, U of O campus
entertainment Brett is contacting four international studentgroups who might provide entertainment
speakers Bern Johnson, E-law, approximately 20 minutes
Anita Tanner on the parents' perspective, 6-8 minutes
dinner potluck by WCPCA members plus some purchased food
handout a short flyer about WCPCA and its interest in fundingprojects sponsored by local volunteers; Dorothy will work on this.
WCPCA liaison person to work with Brett especially on decorating the longhouse and recruiting helpers for the event Benj

We talked about the various items that WCPCA has that can be used for decorating. It would be good for board members who have suchitems to let Benj know about them directly.

Brett recommends a PC Wiki site that has been put together by an RPCV. This is not an official site.

New board members: James will be working on finding new people to joint the board as at-large members. He invites suggestions.

Potluck planning: Our next potluck will be on Friday, March 14th, 6:00pm, at the home of Deb McLaughlin, 2080 Friendly.

The program will be a presentation by Anita Tanner about her recent trip to Mongolia to visit her daughter, Hannah Klausman, who is a PCV there. Ms. Tanner will talk about the country and her daughter's project.

We acknowledged that Rex Stevens, a longtime member, has written to both Wayne and Dorothy about his interest in expressing his thoughts on the "innocents abroad" question. We agreed to give him a few minutes to do this at the next potluck. Dorothy will let him know.

Next board meeting will be on Thursday, March 13th, 7:30 pm at DebMcLaughlin's home. She has wireless internet access and kindly offered her home as a meeting place so that Felicia can show the board the many facets of our website. Deb is aware that she'll have two WCPCA meetings on two successive nights at her home. Thank you, Deb!

Minutes by Dorothy
Approved as corrected by the board, 2-27-08